The truth is that the old style of the Japanese role-playing game, as it was conceived in games like Yuji Horii’s foundational NES game Dragon Quest, has hit an evolutionary dead end.
You hear it all the time, and it is fueled by the success of Western-style RPGs like Fallout 3, Skyrim, and many others that put a heavy emphasis on traditional combat. It’s a patently false statement, of course, as anyone with a Nintendo DS or a PC can tell you, and even despite the shit in RPG style, the big budget epic fantasy with simple, turn-based combat rooted in the old school Dungeons & Dragons rules survive. There is a common refrain in the world of video games: Japanese role-playing games are dead.
